Desktop News Archives

For fans of the lightweight IceWM X11 window manager, released on Sunday was IceWM 3.4 as the newest feature release.

A status update was posted this week around xfwm4-wayland with the Xfce Wayland compositor code.

The folks at System76 have published a new blog post that summarizes their software progress over the course of April on further advancing their Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment.

Last week System76 released System76-Scheduler 2.0 as their Rust-written Linux desktop scheduler that serves as a user-space daemon to dynamically manage process priorities to favor performance and responsiveness. That's now been succeeded by a v2.0.1 update with a few more features and improvements.

Red Hat organized an HDR hackfest to bring together all the Linux desktop stakeholders around the desktop, display drivers, and related infrastructure for helping to make progress on High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support. The event took place last week at Red Hat's Brno office in the Czech Republic and sounds like it was quite a success.

A redesigned version of the Flathub website has launched for this weekend's Linux App Summit. Flathub remains the centralized website for exploring and finding new Flatpak sandboxed Linux apps.

LXQt 1.3 was just released as the newest version of this lightweight Qt-based desktop environment.

In addition to working on their in-house Linux laptop prototype and other hardware endeavors, System76 continues being quite busy working on their COSMIC desktop environment to be used by their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

In addition to new hardware from Colorado-based Linux laptop/desktop retailer System76, this year we can look forward to more work on their COSMIC desktop environment being developed as part of their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Already for kicking off 2023 they have made a number of strides in their COSMIC DE development.

Budgie 10.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source desktop environment that was originally developed as part of the Solus Linux distribution.

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager that has been around since the late 90's, IceWM 3.3.1 was released today as the first (minor) release of 2023.

It's been a while since last having a fresh look at the Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome performance on the Linux desktop, but with a slow Linux/open-source news weekend, here are some fresh numbers with their latest browser releases.

Red Hat has been among the key Linux stakeholders working for years toward the ultimate goal of ensuring the Linux desktop will have suitable High Dynamic Range (HDR) support in place. They are working to organize a hackfest this year to further the progress being made on HDR application support on the GNOME desktop as well as associated open-source graphics driver infrastructure.

After nearly two years of development the Xfce 4.18 desktop environment was released today with a wide assortment of improvements.

The lightweight Xfce 4.18 desktop is planning to release in two weeks while out now is the Xfce 4.18 Pre2 development milestone.

LXQt 1.2 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this lightweight, open-source desktop environment that currently targets the Qt 5.15 LTS toolkit.

The Arcan project that started out as a display server built atop a game engine and with time has introduced many features and experimenting with original approaches to longstanding Linux desktop/display shortcomings, has announced their Cat9 shell. This modern terminal has been in development for nearly six years while now the developers are finally confident in announcing this initiative.

System76 has been developing their own COSMIC desktop as the next evolution for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu base. Interestingly with this big COSMIC desktop undertaking, which is being written in the Rust programming language, they have decided to shift away from using the GTK toolkit to instead make use of Iced-Rs as a Rust-native, multi-platform graphical toolkit.

Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been involved with many great Linux desktop/laptop hardware improvements over the years for work that would have otherwise likely gone unaddressed. One of the initiatives he has been focusing on recently that has long been a sore point for Linux laptops has been the user-space backlight/brightness interface. This week at Linux Plumbers Conference was a presentation on this effort that has long been ripe for improvement.

While the Compiz compositing window manager isn't as popular as it was during its early days of adding animated "bling" to the Linux desktop or when it was in use by Ubuntu, there still are some users having fun with it and a handful of contributors making some maintenance and other progress to it.

NsCDE 2.2 has been released as the newest feature version of the "Not so Common Desktop Environment" that takes its inspiration from the CDE desktop once common with Unix workstations.

Yesterday marked the release of LightDM 1.32 as the first official release of this display manager since 2019.

Arcan 0.6.2 was released this week as the newest version of the open-source display server built atop a game engine and aiming to compete with the likes of X11 and Wayland while focusing on advanced capabilities.

In time for making your open-source Easter basket is the release of LXQt 1.1 as the newest feature release to this open-source, Qt-based desktop environment born out of the merging of the former Razor-qt and LXDE projects.

FreeType as the widely-used, open-source library for font rendering is out with FreeType 2.12 as its first big feature release since last summer.

OBS Studio as the wonderful, cross-platform open-source software for screen recording and screencasting purposes is out with a shiny new feature release.

DirectFB2 is in development with work on it having started last year after the original DirectFB project ceased development a half-decade ago. While more embedded/mobile platforms have moved on from DirectFB and now targeting Wayland, DirectFB2 hopes to restore its viability for embedded systems.

Quietly making its v1.0 debut today is system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution.

With starting a new year, it's an interesting time to take a fresh look at how the latest Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers are competing on the Linux desktop.

Carsten Haitzler released a new version of the Enlightenment window manager / shell (and Wayland compositor) for Christmas. Various Enlightenment components have also seen new releases.

Lumina is the desktop project originally started by PC-BSD/TrueOS developers as a BSD-focused desktop environment built atop Qt. When TrueOS stopped focusing on being a great desktop BSD, Lumina development stalled. But for Linux and BSD users fond of this lightweight Qt desktop, Lumina Desktop development restarted a few months ago.

Arcan as an open-source display server stack originally built atop a game engine and embracing VR/XR, and pushing forward on other new technologies is out with a new version.

System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own "COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment.

After eight years in development, the LXQt desktop that was created by the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt open-source desktop projects is celebrating its v1.0 release.

The Lumina Desktop Environment as the BSD-3 licensed desktop originally spearheaded for TrueOS/PC-BSD but found supported as well by other BSDs and Linux distributions is out with a rare new release.

Given last week's release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux.

HarfBuzz 3.0 has been released as a new version of this widely-used, open-source text shaping library that is used by the major Linux desktop environments along with Chrome OS, Java, Android, Chrome, and a plethora of other software projects and UI toolkits.

There's still some time to go before seeing the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for this open-source image manipulation program but at least out this weekend is GIMP 2.10.28 for bettering the current stable series.

For passionate Phoronix readers around the Rust programming language, SixtyFPS is a new graphical toolkit offering focused on Rust but also supporting C++ and JavaScript.

After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more.

The Maui open-source user interface framework and Maui Apps are out with a new release for those interested in this framework and applications that are designed to work well cross-device as well as largely working cross-platform too.

FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol is up to version 2.4 and exciting about this release is multi-threaded decoding support.

For nearly one decade there has been talk of UPower 1.0 while in 2021 that still has yet to materialize for this former "DeviceKit-Power" project but at least now there is UPower v0.99.12 as the first release in two years.

GNUstep as the free software / GNU implementation of the Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks is out with a new version.

System76 has their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu and have long been customizing their GNOME-based desktop. However, the Linux PC vendor is now taking things a step further by developing their own desktop environment dubbed COSMIC.

Arcan, the long running open-source display server built atop a game engine that has embraced technologies like XR/VR and Wayland and claims feature parity with X.Org this week announced their new Pipeworld project.

XScreenSaver as the open-source screensaver solution for Linux as well as macOS systems this last week reached version 6.0. With XScreenSaver 6.0 comes increased security and other enhancements.

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning.

Shells.com is a "personal cloud computer" that makes it possible to have a remote secure desktop from the browser whether it be running on a smartphone, tablet, smart TV, or other device. They have been supporting a number of different Linux distributions while more continue to be on the way.

Flatpak 1.10 is out this morning as the stable release following the Flatpak 1.9 development series for this Linux app sandboxing / distribution technology.